


Sad Ghosts

by sharkcar



Series: Clone Wars Tarot Cards [21]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Addiction, Art, Clones, Drug Addiction, Growing Up, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Sign Language, Tarot, Twi'leki, Twi'leks, indoctrination
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-23
Updated: 2018-03-23
Packaged: 2019-04-07 00:24:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14068875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sharkcar/pseuds/sharkcar
Summary: Cut Lawquane doesn't mind having Captain Rex come to stay. Rex was family, and Cut's motto is, 'We always help everyone we can.' But when a new brother arrives, Cut's convinced he looks like nothing but trouble.Commander Wolffe enjoys being subversive, as usual.





	Sad Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> So this story, I started months ago. But the central question, about the kinds of things we teach children, feels kind of relevant now. It's been a central focus of Star Wars from the beginning. Commander Wolffe is probably my favorite narrator, but it is fun to write him from somebody else's perspective. Propaganda art of authoritarian regimes served as a big inspiration for this illustration. The image is one part a famous painting of Hitler. Another part the Baphomet statue that was piece of protest art against the lack of separation between church and state. A third part the painting of Vigo the Carpathian from Ghostbusters II. Watching that end of the Rebels season, with those hand signals on the Mortis gods, I was really happy to see them make reference to the importance of gesture in art as a way to convey meaning.

[LINK HERE: The Devil](https://sharkcar.tumblr.com/post/172174443470/the-devil-part-of-a-series-of-clone-wars-tarot)

I wedged a shard of scrap plastic into a gap in the wall. “I thought when you described your Jedi commander, that you were talking about an adult.” All of the Jedi I had seen looked grown. Truthfully, though, I had only seen most of them from a distance in that arena on Geonosis. A lot of them were species I didn’t recognize. Most were dead. I was general infantry, no one took the time to explain it to me.  
  
“No,” Rex corrected as he pounded the wedge into the space with a small mallet, “Togruta younglings age like normal humans or Twi’leks. She was fourteen, so older than me, but she hadn’t even developed an adult body yet and they trusted her with a laser sword. Compared to Jedi and clones, typical kids on Coruscant weren’t given very much responsibility. But kids can do more than we think.” Rex and I had grown up fast, literally. Rapid aging had been programmed into our DNA, so we were the age of what would have been middle schoolers for human children on Ryloth or Coruscant. But we looked like men, so people held us to that standard. It was still hard for me sometimes to know how to be the man people expected. My step-daughter Shaeeah was only two years younger than me. Rex had been urging me to train Shaeeah and her brother Jek to use weapons.  
  
I covered the gap with a layer of the spackle Rex had invented. We were patching the house walls where drafts were getting in. “I don’t know,” I shook my head, “Telling kids to believe in some religion when they’re not old enough to know what’s happening to them? Then telling them it’s their sacred duty to fight? What’s wrong with letting them be carefree for a while?” I didn’t want to judge what other people did, but I still found the idea of children fighting a war unethical.  
  
We were always told in the clone academy that although we were only going to be ten years old when we were drafted, our physiological age had to be adult. The cloners told us they made us this way because it was considered immoral in the Republic to have children as soldiers. I wondered why their moral standards didn’t extend to us, just because we looked older. I believe now, as I did then, that it wasn’t right in either case, Jedi, clone or any other sentient. My children were twelve and nine and I didn’t want them on the front lines. And I’d deserted the Grand Army of the Republic at ten years old. I didn’t want to be on the front lines either.  
  
“Being carefree can’t last forever. And anyway, they were born with great power, so the only thing you could do was train them and trust that you taught them well enough. Like they did with us.” Rex took a sip from his flask. My biggest worry about our taking him in had been that Rex wouldn’t adjust well to this kind of life. But he said that without the army telling him what to do, he actually had time to pursue his interests. He’d set up a still recently. He experimented with ways to make the farm run more efficiently. He said he wasn’t surprised how much the slow pace of rural life suited him. He told me that ‘Fett’ actually meant ‘farmer’ in Concordian dialect. Apparently it was in our blood.  
  
I didn’t know things like that. They never educated us enlisted guys much back on Kamino. The Mandalorian combat trainers hadn’t spent as much time with us as they had the leadership guys like Rex. The trainers had adopted Rex as something of a mascot, he said. Rex had served under the famous Obi-Wan Kenobi, the very Jedi who had arrived on Kamino to announce that the time had come, the war had started, our sacred duty was upon us. Even on Geonosis we were in awe of him. I only ever saw him once from a distance. He had a crowd of brothers around him already then. Rex said that guy knew everything about Mandalorians and had made him proud of what he was.  
  
While we were doing our patchwork, Rex had been telling me stories about the war. I found that working helped him talk. I think it was that if we were working we could talk without making eye contact. We clones have trouble expressing our feelings. That was discouraged where we grew up. Most of what he talked about sounded frightening to me, but Rex still seemed to think he had done some good. There were people he protected that were worth the sacrifice. Rex always tried to focus on the positive. I couldn’t really judge, since I didn’t have one tenth his experience. Like all brothers, I had been raised on Kamino. Then I was part of the group that fought on Geonosis. Next, I had been boarded on a transport. It was destroyed and I was the only survivor of an escape pod crash on Saleucami, where I have been since. I didn’t feel attached to the Jedi or the citizens of the Republic like he did because I’d never met them.  
  
Rex didn’t condescend about how ignorant I was of the outside universe. But I could tell he felt bad for me. The things he said he’d seen, I felt bad for him, too. We shared a face, we can’t hide things from each other. The guy had scars, things he didn’t, or couldn’t, talk about.  
  
I had invited him to stay with us the first time we met. He had actually wanted to turn me in to the Republic for deserting the army. I couldn’t believe what he was saying, since I thought every brother knew you didn’t rat on each other. That was our reality on Kamino. If we brothers didn’t stick together, no one else would protect us. He made me worried about what the war was doing to my brothers. But regardless, I was polite. I tried to reason with him. I at least convinced him that neither one of us was wrong. My family needed me and I did what was best for them, just like we brothers always had for each other. That was more real to me than some ‘Republic’ I’d only ever heard of in the fairy tale universe they taught us about in the academy. He never told anyone where I was. The brother was at least that loyal to family.  
  
Then right before the end of the war, Rex had fled here. I didn’t ask too many questions. It had taken us a while in our area to even receive the news that Coruscant was attacked. The official news outlets didn’t let us know what had happened. It didn’t change our day to day lives. Before, Rex’s priority had been loyalty to his duty. That all fell apart when he realized what his duty would be to kill a bunch of his friends. He finally said, ‘no’ he wouldn’t be a part of it. He’d come back to Saleucami to stay with us. I didn’t say ‘I told you so’. We have a face we make when we know we’re wrong.  
  
When Rex had come to live on the farm, at first it felt strange for a little brother to have anything to teach me. Back on Kamino, we first batchers consistently bullied guys who were smaller than us. Rex was six months younger than me, but he had the manners of a guy who was much older. Polite to the point it was funny. He blushed just seeing my wife Suu’s undergarments hanging on the clothes line.  
  
Rex slept out in the loft of the barn. He said he felt more comfortable where he could get a good vantage point to check for threats. The loft doors afforded him a better view of the perimeter he claimed. My wife joked to him that she understood, he probably didn’t want to hear us at night. But Suu and I knew about the nightmares he had, sometimes we could hear him screaming. The kids asked some questions. Suu asked me to try to talk to him, but I didn’t know what to say. I thought it would only embarrass him if he knew we heard.  
  
Rex was pretty private. He had set aside a little living space for himself. He didn’t have much, a few cups, some armor, lots of guns. I collected weapons too, not without good reason. The first time Rex had come to my home was back during the war. Let’s just say, even out here in the rural countryside of a remote planet, battle droids could be out gunning people down if their programming went haywire. I’m not saying I wanted to fight, but I believed in being prepared if a fight came to me. The perils of warfare, there are no real civilians.  
  
I had to concede that Rex did have some kind of a point about teaching. My wife Suu had taught the children how to use tools once they were big enough to handle them. Tools we used to survive. When I came to the farm, the children could already mend paddock fences and operate threshing machines better than I could. And Suu knew how to defend herself.  
  
“I don’t know, brother. Aren’t there better things to teach them than violence? Like teaching them to have respect for other people. Or to tell the truth. Or to love their family. If you teach them those things, it will be easy for them to choose the right things.” I moved along the wall, matching up the holes with the scrap pieces I’d collected. Rex followed along, hitting them into place.  
  
Rex shrugged, “I don’t presume to tell you what to do, brother, of course.”  
  
That day, Rex and I had a shockball game on the network receiver while we worked. The transmission was pretty staticky, but there wasn’t much else for entertainment. You had to go to the local trade outpost to get any kind of decent holo-reception and even then, the transmissions were slow. Just as one shockball announcer started bickering with its other head about a penalty call, a ship appeared above us. It was wobbling like a tooka being lowered into water and was smoking wildly in a way that made it look as if the vessel was projectile vomiting. I looked at Rex and made that face that meant, ‘Are you seeing this too?’  
  
He knew immediately what I meant, we were identical after all.  
  
The ship landed with an awkward thud and some odd screeching, in the middle of the yard, knocking over the clothesline, Suu’s underwear went everywhere.  
  
“Hey!” I yelled. The maniac was probably some drunk, I thought.  
  
Rex grabbed his rifle and jumped off the porch, aiming at the ramp. He was fresh back from the war, he was jumpy. I aimed mine, too, but more slowly. Out in the country, uninvited guests can spell trouble.  
  
The port opened and out stumbled a creature, who smelled like an animal. One of the ones you see lying on the ground and mistake for dead and when you go to poke it with a stick, it opens its eyes. I jumped back. Behind me, Rex threw aside his gun and ran towards the creature.  
  
"Wolffe!" He hugged the man and suddenly, I could see the resemblance. It’s the nose, gives us away. “I thought you were dead, for sure!” Rex crushed our brother’s head to his shoulder.  
  
Rex put his hands on our brother’s shoulders and backed him away to look him in the eyes. I noticed that the eyes were rimmed with red and only one was organic. One eye was a cybernetic. I had heard of such things, but they never gave brothers prostheses before the war. Back on Kamino, if a brother was deemed unfit for duty, he was euthanized or sent to maintenance corps and left to make do in whatever state he was in. I had heard of cybernetics, of course, but it had been hard to imagine. We barely had stocked first aid kits out here in the country and this guy had been wired back together simple as could be. In some parts of the galaxy, that was routine. It was bizarre to see my face look that way.  
  
Wolffe looked like he wanted to say something. He took a few gulps of air.  
  
“Brother, you look terrible…what happened?” Rex put one hand on Wolffe’s cheek. From where I was, I could see the contrast in their color. From working outside on the farm, Rex and I were both tanned. Wolffe’s was paler, tinged with a sickly purplish gray.  
  
Wolffe took a deep breath. Made a face that I had definitely seen before. Then he threw up on Rex’s boots. I wondered how Rex didn’t see that coming.  
  
\--  
  
Suu ran out of the house to see if we needed help.  
  
Rex said he could handle it. He hadn’t laughed. He seemed in anguish, but somehow also…happy.  
  
“I won’t lose you, brother. Not now. You made it, brother. I got you.” Rex murmured reassuringly. He took Wolffe’s hand and put his arm around his neck, helping him the way you drag a wounded brother off a battlefield. “The war ended a few weeks ago, where have you been? You obviously understood my message.”  
  
Suu looked at me, worried. “I thought you said he didn’t tell anyone where you were.” For all we knew, a wave of brothers would start arriving. We didn’t have the resources to help a large group. We’d barely made enough the last harvest to cover Rex for the year, and he was productive. The new brother didn’t look like he’d even live long.  
  
I looked at my wife. Spouses get used to each other that way, over time they develop the ability to tell what the other one’s thinking. Suu and I exchanged a glance that said we had a bad feeling about this.  
  
Our children, Shaeeah and Jek were not home from the schoolhouse yet. I was glad. We brothers are used to seeing scary situations, but I wanted to keep the kids as innocent as I could. I’d been on a battlefield once and I still had vivid memories about it. Jek still had nightmares about the droids that had attacked our home the first time Rex had come to visit.  
  
I couldn’t help but be a little annoyed that Rex had brought trouble again.  
  
No, I told myself, stubbornly. This man needs our help.  
  
Besides Rex, I had not seen another brother since I’d crashed here. But the ones I had lost in the crash, we had buried. Burying them was the decent thing to do, Suu said. My heart told me she was right. Suu had helped me move them and dig the holes, even though she hadn’t known my brothers and they weren’t her family. She even cried for them. It was Suu, who took me in and even cared for me when I was afraid and didn’t have anyone else in the universe. After that I had decided that my brothers weren’t the only people who mattered in the universe, everyone must.  
  
Suu whispered to me as Rex helped Wolffe inside. “Cut, that man is very sick.”  
  
She had a point, if he was contagious, we would have to keep the children away. This new arrival was going to be problematic, I could tell already. We might be able to depend on neighbors to share with us if we were desperate, but we would owe them work come planting season. If this guy ate but couldn’t work, we’d all be at risk. I always made my decisions based on what was best for my family. But I didn’t know what kind of man I’d be if I didn’t stick to what I believed in.  
  
I hugged my wife, “We always help everyone we can.”  
  
I could just tell that this guy was going to make me question the reasonable limits of what a man ‘can’ do.  
  
\--  
  
Rex set Wolffe down in Suu and my bedroom and said he was preparing for what would be a difficult couple of days.  
  
“What’s the matter with him?” Suu asked Rex.  
  
Rex looked down with that face we use to mean we were ashamed.  
  
Wolffe didn’t look ashamed, “Just tell them, I don’t care.”  
  
“Um…Commander Wolffe usually does a lot of substances. Looks like withdrawals,” Rex admitted. “You don’t need to worry about this, Suu, I’ll take care of him.”  
  
The new guy was an officer. As an enlisted brother, I had been raised to assume these guys were my betters.  
  
“Cut, who is that man?” Suu asked when we went outside to the water pump. It shocked me that she couldn’t even tell he was a clone. He was like Rex, and myself, an exact twin of us genetically. That’s how bad he looked.  
  
“Uh, it’s my brother.” I admitted, scratching the back of my neck.  
  
“So you know him?” Suu didn’t really know much about how our family worked.  
  
“Uh…no.” I admitted. I knew better than to try to lie to her. We didn’t seem to know what to say to each other, so we stayed busy with our tasks. We boiled a pot on the wood stove and added it to the cold water from outside. Then Suu and I carried the tub and set it down on the bedroom floor.  
  
Wolffe didn’t really seem to have the energy to do more than go through the motions. And every motion elicited a wince of pain. Rex led him to the washtub and wet a towel. Then he helped him undress. Wolffe was shivering and emaciated. It just looked so sad.  
  
The kids got home just as Wolffe was naked and standing in the tub.  
  
“Mommy, that man has a nipple ring with a skull on it!” My daughter Shaeeah shouted.  
  
My son Jek dropped his rucksack and stared with wide eyes. “That’s awesome!”  
  
It seemed absurd to be laughing, but I couldn’t help it. I tried to turn it into a cough. Rex blushed.  
  
Suu sighed, crossed her arms and shook her head. “We don’t have equipment for an intravenous hydration but it will be hard for him to keep anything down.” She looked concerned, not put upon. He was too pitiful. We couldn’t turn him away now.  
  
Wolffe announced from the washtub, “I got a method! I…,” he pointed his finger, “I have a bag in the ship! Drinks and canned food rations, water, stomach soothing medicine. You there, kid, would you get the bag from my ship?” He was speaking in the tone brothers use when giving pre-battle briefings.  
  
My son Jek ran off looking dutiful.  
  
“Is he drunk?” Suu whispered to me.  
  
“One can’t cut off alcohol all at once, freykaa.” Wolffe said loudly but under his breath in imitation of her whisper.  
  
I cocked an eyebrow. I wasn’t sure what he’d called her.  
  
“When you been drinking as much as I have the last few weeks, you need to come down gradually. I’m gonna get the shakes as it is. Rex, do you have any clear distillates?” Wolffe made a gesture miming drinking.  
  
Rex had told me he had learned how to make alcohol because most brothers had a habit. I had never had a drink before I met Suu. But I quickly learned that most adults shared beverages together socially. I had seen the dangers of drinking too much, though. Even out in the country, we had neighbors who fell off of their eopies or crashed their speeders into ditches. Or hit their wives and children.  
  
Rex didn’t over-imbibe. He seemed to be making it as a challenge, to create useful things out of what we had around the farm. He was distilling alcohol from orchard fruits that had fallen on the ground and couldn’t be harvested. Or grains that were too mealy. The alcohol worked as a disinfectant for cuts and things. It tasted terrible though.  
  
“I just need something with enough of a kick to kill the germs in my stomach.” Wolffe splashed his face with some water, slopping it all over the floor.  
  
“I don’t think that’s how that works.” Rex dutifully sponged off Wolffe’s naked body. It was done with all the efficiency with which one washed a fathier or a speeder.  
  
“Ow!” Wolffe shouted weakly. “You are not gentle. I feel bad for any woman that lets you near her.”  
  
Rex pointed a finger at him, “You keep it up and I’ll have Shaeeah here go and get me the scrub brush we use on the barn animals.”  
  
Shaeeah giggled, “He smells like a barn animal.”  
  
Wolffe laughed.  
  
My family didn’t seem phased by the absurdity of the situation. Suu had often bathed the kids this way. Twi’leks are pretty open about nudity. Wolffe had nothing my wife hadn’t seen before, literally. Shaeeah helped bathe Jek and lived on a farm her whole life. She had seen animals doing what is natural. But I felt downright awkward to see myself naked in front of everyone. On Kamino, we were herded onto compartmented wash conveyers to bathe every morning and were electrocuted if we didn’t keep our bodies covered. I was still only comfortable being naked with Suu.  
  
“I got a method, I tell ya!” Wolffe was downright conversational by then.  
  
Jek came running in with a messenger bag. “Uncle, here.”  
  
“Wolffe, did anyone follow you? Did you tell anyone where you went?” Rex glanced at me apologetically. He had told this brother where he was going. Now we were all at risk. I was technically Missing in Action and Rex had faked his own death, so we thought they wouldn’t be looking for us. But we didn’t know the status of this brother. He could have been pursued.  
  
“No. I was the only survivor from the ground assault team. No one knows I’m alive. I’ve been laying low on Smuggler’s Moon for a few weeks on a bender. I made sure the entire time that I was flying here that I was drunk enough that all I’d do if anybody stopped me was ramble incoherently. They’d think I was too drunk to realize I was AWOL. At most they’d throw me in jail and you’d be safe. As it is, I’m presumed deceased.” Wolffe responded. I was surprised, but it sounded like a halfway decent plan.  
  
Suu showed a flash of recognition. She whispered to me, “Some numa called here before. Asking about her ‘brother’. I sort of told her he would be back sometime. I thought it was Rex’s girlfriend or something, just making sure he was safe. She seemed to understand what she needed to, didn’t ask any more questions. Never called back.” Suu’s word, numa, meant ‘sister’. As in another Twi’lek. Twi’leks didn’t talk to outsiders about their business. Loyalty to each other had been vital to their survival after the Hutts took over their homeworld. Family over authority, just like we clones believed back in the academy.  
  
“I had told Rex about it, but he said it was probably nothing.” Suu admitted. They hadn’t told me. Rex and Suu had something between them that they hadn’t told me. I didn’t know why that bothered me.  
  
Wolffe pointed at Suu from the washtub while Rex scrubbed his feet. “That’s how I found you. I couldn’t have done it on my own. Rex didn’t send me any coordinates or anything.” Wolffe let Rex wrap him in a towel. It was our only good towel. “All I had was that story you told me. You said there was a brother that had found another way to live. That we always had a choice. Everyone thinks you’re dead, even Cody and General Skywalker. But I figured it out! And here you are!” Wolffe stood trembling while Rex dried him off. “I wasn’t wrong.” He wiped his face with a corner of the towel and sniffed.  
  
Suu gave him a look of pity as she took some of my clothes from my drawer and gave them to him to put on. For some reason, that bothered me too.  
  
“C.C. might tell someone where you went.” Rex didn’t sound accusatory. Just concerned.  
  
“No one would be able to make numa tell her secrets! Am I right, freykaa?” Wolffe somehow managed to make it sound sinister. I think it was the look he gave Suu. That face we make when we think we’re being cute. Good thing he still looked like hell.  
  
\--  
  
The next few days were a bit of a strain on all of us. The kids asked a lot of questions. They were polite, but curious. Suu and I kept our concerns to ourselves. Suu confessed after the kids went to sleep one night that she didn’t want the children to be scared if he died ugly. Her first husband, the children’s father, had died one winter from an infection that they simply had no cure for. The trauma of losing their father had occurred when the kids were small. They were old enough to know better about what was happening now.  
  
The children’s father had something that would have been treatable in more civilized places. To obtain medicines, the travel costs alone were unreachable for simple farmers. We were just trying to keep ourselves all fed. Suu’s husband had just wasted away.  
  
When Suu first told me the story, I had only ever seen Kamino and Geonosis, I had no idea what it was like not to have things like vaccines and antibiotics. I’d never seen anyone die by illness, most clones were euthanized if they were very sick. She described something that looked like those skeletal battle droids, bony and halfway unconscious. I’d needed Suu to explain it to me in detail so I could even picture it, someone being made comfortable and cared for, until they were completely gone. It seemed to me like it’d be harder that way.  
  
We brothers had been discouraged from getting attached, to each other. Over half of the first batch of us didn’t survive, so death was a part of the daily routine. The cloners thought this was a good thing, that those with defects were identified. But they would call it good, since that meant they were patting themselves on the back. They were the ones who came up with the system based on what was most profitable to them. All I knew was that I couldn’t help but miss my brothers who had died because they’d been part of my family. That’s why we’d buried those brothers from the pod crash. It was a sign of my attachment to them.  
  
Rex was fascinated by the idea of natural death as well. He said he’d had an ARC Trooper who was half cybernetic and who was imprisoned in a machine by something called the Techno-Union. Their drives were hooked up to his brain with wires, pulling his memories directly from his head while he was half conscious. That sounded like a nightmare to me. Rex said that wasn’t the worst thing he’d seen in the war.  
  
Rex tried to minimize our burden by doing everything for Wolffe himself. There was a lot of cleanup. Wolffe didn’t make things easy. Rex never complained, but he looked tired. Wolffe had given him an account of what the end of the war had been like. I guess news of some of their friends. We couldn’t help but be kind to Rex when we’d meet him in the kitchen or in the barn where he’d go to take long naps. He might lose somebody he cared about any day. He looked like he was barely keeping it together. When he wasn’t with Wolffe he was in the barn. He only ate whatever Wolffe couldn’t finish. He was trying to minimize the burden on our food rations for the season.  
  
But there were burdens we all bore. Caring for someone who cannot contribute to a group was a risk out where we were. We had only so much food and medicine. He took up other people’s time getting things for him. I was always doing mental calculations about supplies and labor. Shaeeah might have to stay home from school some days if we didn’t have enough help around the farm. Animals still had to be fed and cleaned up after. I was somewhat ashamed to be thinking about such mundane things while a brother was in such a state. But burying brothers seemed easy by comparison.  
  
There was something else, too. Suu and I were sleeping in the upstairs room with the kids while Rex tended to Wolffe. So Suu and I didn’t have any time alone. It was making me irritable. Before this Wolffe brother had showed up, Rex, Suu and I had become friends and had relaxed into a rhythm. Rex had done his best to be a productive member of the household. I was able to do a lot more with his help. He was good with the kids. And he gave us our space. Suu and I were still a married couple. Rex did his best to demonstrate that I had no reason to be jealous. We were all friends. If something happened to me, I wouldn’t even mind them being together. But as it was, I wanted her to myself. Every time Suu went in there to check on Wolffe, I’d hear him say something to her that would start her laughing. I didn’t know if I liked this brother. I think the brother could tell from my face.  
  
I didn’t know when I had ever seen a brother who caused more trouble.  
  
\--  
  
After a while, Wolffe could get up and around. He could get himself to the toilet at least, instead of using the buckets beside the bed. Rex said he would move him out to the loft as soon as Wolffe could climb the ladder to the barn loft. Wolffe didn’t say much to me. He stayed under the blanket most of the day, shivering. Or listening to music on his player pod. He we could hear him from the living room murmuring in his sleep what sounded like one side of dialogue. Like he was performing scripts.  
  
One afternoon, Rex was trying to get some sleep. I met him out in the barn and told him I was headed inside. I’d check on Wolffe for him.  
  
I heard Wolffe retching so I waited in the hallway for him to finish. I looked through the crack in the door and I was surprised to see my son Jek sitting on the bed with a stack of old music disks. He was looking at the pile of printed news articles that I had brought Rex whenever I went to the depot for supplies. I had skimmed a few of them, but all of what was happening felt very far away to me. Names of places and people I didn’t recognize. I felt bad for my brothers who’d chosen to stay behind, Rex told me things were going to be tough for them. Even Rex knew there was nothing we could do for them.  
  
The music disks were old ones that had belonged to Jek’s father. My wife Suu’s first husband had been a half Twi'lek-half human slave musician for a Hutt before they gained their freedom. He was well known locally because he had played music at all the social gatherings. Everyone talked about him but Jek had barely known him.  
  
Wolffe came out of the toilet closet and looked surprised to find Jek there. I waited outside the door, just to be sure Jek was safe. Brother or not, Wolffe was a stranger. Jek had his school bag with him and one of his rolled up drawings was sticking out.  
  
Jek looked at him quizzically. “Hey, uncle, why are all these pictures of the sad ghosts making you and Uncle Rex so angry?”  
  
One of the news articles had a picture of the new uniform armor that was going to be issued to all the clones conscripted into the new Stormtrooper corps. No individuality permitted. Rex had said that in Mandalorian culture, taking someone’s armor signified enslavement. He said the armor represented your home and your family. It was like taking their stories away. I hadn’t worn my armor long, but I knew where every scratch came from. When I had buried my brothers, it was only days into the war. But I somehow thought it was right that they were buried in that armor, it felt disrespectful to do anything else. Rex’s and Wolffe’s had decoration that represented things that were important to them. It was beautiful, I thought, with the color and animal decorations. Every part of it had some meaning for them.  
  
Wolffe pointed at one of the pictures in the articles. “Would you look at this crap. It’s embarrassing. It looks like the plastic they make disposable plates out of.”  
  
Jek looked confused. “Disposable plates? Why would you make plates just to throw away?”  
  
Wolffe thought for a moment, “I don’t know.”  
  
Jek waited for more of an answer, but he didn’t get one.  
  
“So you’re my nephew?” Wolffe looked around, but he didn’t seem to see me. He sat back on the bed and looked through the disk covers.  
  
Jek thought for a moment, “You’re my daddy’s brother, so I guess so. Uncle Rex says you’re like him.”  
  
“I wish I was more like him, nephew.” We brothers were used to referring to each other by familial title, so I guess that was a natural thing to Wolffe to refer to a family member this way. Rex called Suu, ‘sister’. I had asked Suu about that ‘freykaa’ word and she said it meant ‘beloved’. That annoyed me even though it wasn’t an insult. Suu said it was harmless.  
  
“Why would you want to be like him? He’s not any fun.” Jek asked.  
  
Wolffe laughed at this. I stifled a smile. Rex was more protective than a nursery droid.  
  
“Whenever my mommy and daddy tell me to do something, he tells me all the reasons why I should do what they say.” Jek crossed his skinny arms to show he was serious.  
  
Wolffe chuckled again, “Yeah. That sounds about right.”  
  
Jek indicated the disks, “Uncle Rex said you like music. I brought you some of my disks.”  
  
“Arni’soyacho,” Wolffe told him.  
  
Jek was surprised, “Zalat Ryl?”  
  
“Uh…,” Wolffe thought for a second, “Not well.”  
  
Jek looked relieved too. “I understand it better than I speak it. I was little when my real dad died and my new daddy doesn’t speak it, so we just use Basic at home. They teach us in Basic at the school anyway.”  
  
Shaeeah and Jek both attended the schoolhouse that was a few hours walk back and forth every day. It was a lot of effort, but from what I heard about it, it sounded like a better education than my brothers and I had. They got to play with other kids instead of doing combat drills.  
  
“How did you learn Twi’leki? Did you fight on Ryloth?” Jek had never seen his parents’ home planet.  
  
Wolffe smiled, “No. I just had Twi’lek friends back on Coruscant.”  
  
Jek looked fascinated. Even I couldn’t imagine an ecumenopolis like the capital, with all the diverse beings living together.  
  
“How did you meet them?” Jek asked.  
  
“Well, we sort of shared interests.” Wolffe flicked through the disk covers, looking appreciatively at the art on some.  
  
Jek was doing his best to imitate the way Wolffe was sitting. It did look kind of cool. “Like a hobby?” Jek asked.  
  
Wolffe smirked wickedly in that way that we clones do when we’re thinking about sex, “ Sort of.”  
  
Jek was oblivious. “I have hobbies. I’m the best artist at school. I also like fishing. My daddy, my new daddy, I mean, he taught me.”  
  
Wolffe shook his head, enjoying Jek’s innocence. “Cool. Yeah, your daddy and I grew up on a planet with a lot of fish. I am something of a mollusk enthusiast, myself. Particularly bivalves. Whenever I see a clam, I like to just dive my face into that.” He took a drink of water from a cup Rex had left him. He looked out the window, and sighed. His face had not changed. I was only partly sure I understood what he was talking about. Brother seemed to be talking to amuse himself.  
  
Jek was watching the way he held his cup. “So what kind of music do you like?”  
  
“Oh, lots of stuff,” Wolffe opened a few of the disks to see if there was more art on the inserts. “So what kind of music do you like?”  
  
Jek shifted a bit. “Well, my mommy and daddy like this old Twi’lek music. I think that’s boring. I like guitar music. But the teachers at school keep saying that’s degenerate and noisy. That it’ll corrupt us.” Jek’s school had been built by missionaries from some religion that was popular in the Core. His teachers were all strict fundamentalists.  
  
Wolffe put a noisy guitar song on his player pod and Jek smiled. “Never let anyone tell you what to listen to! Adults don’t know anything. I bet your daddy was all kinds of clueless when he got here. None of us ever left Kamino before we were ten.”  
  
Jek knew I didn’t age the same as his mother, but he didn’t know too many natural born humans to compare it with.  
  
“Some people think they know everything. There is this girl at school. She’s ten. She’s pretty dumb. She plays guitar and I want to be friends with her, but she said I was ‘eyan’ because she’s older than me.”  
  
They sat for a moment, enjoying the music. Wolffe had a scrap of paper and was trying to sketch a copy of one of the figures on the disk cover. It was a shapely Twi’lek lady wearing almost no clothing. In his version, she was wearing even less.  
  
Jek seemed curious. Neither Suu nor I was artistically inclined. He’d probably never seen an adult draw before.  
  
Wolffe went on, “Nephew. That sounds funny. It’s nice. I wish I’d had a nephew sooner.”  
  
Jek seemed to have found a friend, “You’re weird.” He didn’t say this as if it was a bad thing.  
  
Wolffe made a face that meant he was joking, “I’ve always been the weird one. All the girls used to call me that, Commander Weird. Except my girl. She called me Baby. I always thought that was ridiculous, because I’m clearly a grown man. I’ve got pubic hair and everything. I’m not weird, girls are weird.”  
  
Jek laughed, “My sister’s weird.”  
  
Wolffe pointed at Jek’s rucksack. “So what’s in the old murse there?”  
  
Jek had never heard that word. I hadn’t either. “In the what?”  
  
Wolffe affected a halfway mocking Core accent. “What’s in your satchel, young nephew?”  
  
“Oh, just my drawing. I came to ask if I could borrow the printouts. I’ve been trying to draw something for hours. It’s just not coming out the way I want it.” He handed the drawing to Wolffe. He had recently become very private about his work with us.  
  
Wolffe unrolled it, it was some kind of flattering portrait of a man who looked somewhat familiar to me, but I couldn’t remember from where.  
  
Wolffe struggled to suppress a face that said he didn’t like it, “Whoa…that…is…quite the….hmmm. What’s this for?”  
  
“They’re having a contest at school, to celebrate the Emperor’s coronation,” Jek answered.  
  
The schoolhouse had been paid for by Senate funded charities during the war. It was part of outreach in vulnerable worlds to try to maintain positive sentiment towards the Republic. The government had given the missionary organization the task of running it. The fundamentalists, in turn, were allowed to set the educational program. They sent a pastor to be the school director. He brought some religious young people from the Core, who were obligated to their sect to teach in exchange for debt forgiveness for their families. Most of their debts were to the religious organization.  
  
We had gone over to sign the kids up for the free school they offered. There was no other school in the area and I thought the kids should have a chance to learn to read. Suu and I both had a lot of work to do, so we didn’t have time to teach them everything. We didn’t even know what the possibilities were with an education but we hoped it would help them.  
  
At the open house, the school director asked me right away what religion I was. I asked him if we had to convert to let the kids go to the school and he said no. So I told him that I’d been raised an atheist Republic loyalist. That had been the only option for us in the clone academy. He told me that we were all morally obligated to worship a divinity rather than show loyalty to any government. I had asked him how to do that and he said he would guide me. Then he tried to convince me to do work around his house for free. I may only have been the age of a typical human middle schooler, but even I wasn’t that stupid.  
  
It seemed strange that the school’s position on secular loyalty seemed to have changed.  
  
The war had ended and the Empire had been declared. We were so far out we didn’t feel many effects. We doubted it mattered, Separatists, Republic, Empire. There were a few engagements on the planet, I guess, but far from us. The news said that the rest of the galaxy was celebrating the peace. Prosperity would return, they told us.  
  
A celebration of the Emperor’s coronation was the first result of the new order that had affected any one of us directly.  
  
“The school said we are going to start using the new Imperial education program. We’ll start each day by standing and reciting a loyalty pledge in front of the Emperor’s portrait.” Jek told him matter of factly. Probably exactly as it had been told to him in class. It felt wrong to me to tell children who they should admire or be loyal to. It seemed too much like the indoctrination we’d received in the clone academy. I was raised a Republic loyalist, but I had lapsed on it as soon as I’d arrived on Saleucami. Even Rex had finally given up on that load of poodoo.  
  
Wolffe squinted at the drawing a few times. “If you win, are they going to hang your drawing up at the school?”  
  
“Better!” Jek was grinning, “It will be sent to Coruscant to be in a contest. The ones voted the best will be put in a museum. They’re going to make the winner into posters that will hang in schools all over the Empire. And I get to paint it on the school as a huge mural!”  
  
Wolffe made a gesture in Twi’lek sign language. It is something Twi’leks use if they couldn’t use their head tails. Twi’leks express a lot through the twitching of their lekku, but some are born without them or lose them in accidents. There are hand signs they have developed to represent the lekku gestures. Wolffe’s gesture meant he was genuinely enthusiastic. “Really! Crap, this is no time to be understated! You want to get their attention, it has got to be over the top, balls to the wall!”  
  
Jek couldn’t believe an adult was paying him this much attention. “What do you mean?”  
  
Wolffe started flipping through the disks again, “I mean, don’t just make him look nice and stately. You have to think about it like one of these album covers. What do you see, dramatic colors, cool lighting, cryptic symbolism, power! Like here, this guy looks like a superhero. Or this one, where he looks so handsome the woman can’t help but grip his leg possessively. Or this one, he looks like a king. Or she’s a warrior knight wielding snakes. Or this one here, a goddess. Or a pimp on a big pile of credits.”  
  
Jek started to sketch, “Okay!”  
  
Wolffe went back to his drawing. After a while, Jek squinted at his work, “Hey, Uncle Wolffe?”  
  
Wolffe borrowed some of Jek’s colors and made the girl he was drawing a bright green. “Yeah?”  
  
Jek frowned, thinking. “Uncle Rex said he was glad you didn’t die. Were you sick?”  
  
Wolffe looked down like he was ashamed of himself. “Uh…yeah.”  
  
Jek looked curious, “What were you sick from? Was it the flu?”  
  
Wolffe was quiet for a second. Like he didn’t know if he should tell. “Uh…no.”  
  
“So what’s the matter with you?” Jek looked over at Wolffe’s drawing.  
  
Wolffe shook his head and sighed, “I ask that every day.”  
  
Jek looked confused.  
  
Wolffe finally went on, “Look, I don’t want to lie, I’ve done a lot I’m not proud of. Your Uncle Rex is right, I was gonna kill myself. The only way I was not was to get some help.”  
  
Jek was rapt with attention. Most of the time, we still talked to him like he was a child. Wolffe’s tone seemed to be conspiratorial. It just guaranteed that whatever his story was, it must be exciting.  
  
“I don’t understand, how were you going to kill yourself?” Jek asked.  
  
Wolffe lowered his voice a bit, “Some people might think you’re too young to know about this. But when I was your physiological age, I wished I had more adults who talked to me honestly. So I’m gonna tell you. I was sick because I had done a lot of drugs. I was trying to stop, but that makes you sicker. Uncle Rex is right, I could have died. But if I’d stayed on drugs, I would have died. I just wasn’t strong enough to control myself.”  
  
Jek had never seen mind altering chemicals more potent than stim caf, alcohol, or the medicinal herbs we grew on the farm. On Kamino, they tested out pharmaceuticals on us to see what we could withstand. Suu had lost more than a few friends of hers to drugs back on Ryloth. People there were impoverished, there wasn’t much else to do. Lots of people had just lost their hope. Suu was against losing people that way.  
  
“Mom says kids shouldn’t do drugs,” Jek tried to adopt Wolffe’s tone of voice.  
  
Wolffe added details to his picture. He returned to speaking normally, “Well…I was ordered to take a lot of them. But I was getting other things for fun when I’d go on leave. I did more and more, it never seemed to stop. Later, I did more because by then it felt bad not to and I didn’t want to feel anything. Sooner or later I would have ended up dead from them or from the war. I don’t think I cared what happened to me.”  
  
Jek was a child, so by nature, he focused on the positive, “But you’re here. You didn’t die.” He said it in the same tone as he said, ‘And they lived happily ever after’ at the end of the stories he read to his mother while she cooked at night.  
  
“I know. Because I asked for help. That’s why Rex has been taking care of me. Because I asked for his help and he didn’t abandon me. I knew if I had one person in the galaxy who would help me, I wasn’t really alone. And now look, other people helped me, too. I have a new family. Your dad’s right, there are other ways to be.” I wondered if Wolffe didn’t really know I was there.  
  
Jek showed Wolffe his drawing, “I combined a few of the things from the covers.”  
  
“Looks good,” Wolffe told him. He sketched a few corrections and Jek laughed.  
  
Jek thought for a moment, “Why did you decide to ask for help, I thought you said you didn’t care?”  
  
“Well, I didn’t care about me, but I did care about somebody else. She knew I needed to get away from her if I was going to live. When I left, she didn’t want me to come back. I didn’t want to let go, but she didn’t give me a choice.” Wolffe put his drawing on the nightstand.  
  
Jek was mesmerized, “That seems like it would have made you feel sadder.”  
  
“Well, the last thing she told me was to take care of myself. I have to do it, because I still care what she thinks of me. Even if she won’t ever hear about any of it,” Wolffe shrugged.  
  
Jek knitted his brow, “I thought you said you thought girls are weird.”  
  
“That’s why it’s good to be weird, nephew. Girls think being unpredictable is sexy.” The way he said it made me uncomfortable. He seemed entirely too sure what women thought was sexy.  
  
“They do?” Jek asked.  
  
I wasn’t sure I liked how interested Jek seemed either. I had very limited experience to provide any answers to his questions about that.  
  
Wolffe sipped some more water. “Of course. If you do something daring, girls will be all over you.”  
  
Jek knitted his brow, “I’m not sure I want that.” I was relieved for that.  
  
Wolffe looked out the window again, “Go become a B’omarr monk now, your life will be infinitely less complicated without women in it. They were part of the reason I got into drugs. I found it easier to talk to them when I was on drugs. And doing it on drugs is amazing…”  
  
I felt I had to intervene at this point, “Ahem.”  
  
Wolffe smirked. I think he had known all along that I was there. “Oh, hey, brother.” He said, dripping with insincere surprise.  
  
“Doing what?” Jek asked.  
  
\--  
  
Soon after this, Wolffe vacated the bedroom and moved to the loft with Rex. He cleaned thoroughly first. He also moved the furniture around in a way that made the room more inviting. He even did the laundry. He did such a good job at it, Suu gave him that task permanently.  
  
\--  
  
Jek’s art won the prize. The school director sent a note home from school telling us. The director had judged the prototypes and sent it on to Coruscant for the galaxy wide contest. He said the rest of the neighborhood would see the work at a special unveiling ceremony once the mural was painted. The boy was talented, even I could tell and I’d never seen much art.  
  
Wolffe was up and around, so he volunteered to help Jek paint the mural on the wall of the school.  
  
Rex pulled him aside once he heard this. “You’re not just doing this so you can huff paint cans?” His expression was dubious.  
  
I wasn’t even sure what he was talking about.  
  
“No!” Brother seemed offended.  
  
Rex cocked an eyebrow.  
  
“Why don’t you trust me?” Wolffe grumbled.  
  
“So why are you so eager? You never did anything but make fun of the Republic before.” Rex was right, the brother was making that face we make when we are getting away with something.  
  
“Because I have always supported the arts! I want to help talented people find an audience.” Wolffe said this in a tone that meant he was completely untrustworthy.  
  
Rex shook his head and furrowed his brow.  
  
Wolffe and Jek insisted on the strictest secrecy before the unveiling of the mural. Jek told me in a conspiratorial tone that the only person they’d allowed to look under the tarp beforehand was a little ten year old girl who played guitar.  
  
Most of the families with farms in the area came to the school for the unveiling. The missionaries were all there in their weird matching uniforms, handing out pamphlets about their religion. Wolffe kept reading the literature and asking the missionaries to explain paradoxes he found. He insisted that the school director thoroughly explain the religion’s cosmology and answer specific questions about the nature of their divinity. All the while on the sly, he was flirting with the school director’s absolutely beautiful Twi’lek wife.  
  
I watched this from the sidelines sipping from a flask. Rex had brought a few liters of his latest distillate. It was not an improvement on the last batch, but we were desperate. The religious stuff was boring and the missionaries weren’t allowed alcohol. So groups of us kept going behind the school to share a bottle. After a while, the crowd was laughing and having fun. I asked Wolffe if he wanted any. He said he fully expected to have relapses but for now he was trying to go without.  
  
“One day at a time, right?” Just from his face, I could tell how hard it must have been.  
  
As the missionaries’ sales pitch droned on, the crowd was loosening up. Social events were rare out there in the country, so we welcomed the opportunity, despite the missionaries’ agenda. The local population was made up mostly of Twi’leks, the administrators and teachers at the school were all humans from Coruscant. They didn’t speak Twi’leki. They certainly didn’t understand the gestures being made with the lekku and the hands. Wolffe kept making one that represented sarcasm and then carried on a whole conversation where he seemed to agree with this woman. Once Suu explained the gesture, even Rex and I could understand it.  
  
Wolffe made sure to get the family space right at the front of the crowd for the unveiling. He had already told the neighbors that he was expecting lots of applause, while he circulated the crowd praising Jek’s talent, gesturing that he meant that genuinely. He and my son had something between them, I could tell from the glances they exchanged.  
  
When they finally uncovered the mural, the entire crowd gasped. Then after a few seconds, they erupted in cheers, and then delighted laughter, whistles and hoots. Jek had painted the Emperor subtly doing rude gestures with his hands. In Twi’leki sign language, they meant something like ‘shove your lekku up your own ass’.  
  
Wolffe copied the gesture and shouted, “Hail the Emperor!” Some of our neighbors joined in. Then the rest of the crowd.  
  
\--  
  
The mural stayed up, no one ever told the missionaries anything. The school director’s wife didn’t even explain it to him.  
  
Among the children in the county, Jek became a legend. People traveled for kilometers just to see the mural and take their pictures in front of it, copying the gesture. As for the contest, we heard Jek’s artwork won some kind of award. But we never saw anything from it. There was no cash prize, it was all for the glory of the Empire.  
  
After this, the little girl with the guitar was a regular visitor at the house for dinner as she and my son walked home together from the schoolhouse every day. I usually heard them talking together about how adults didn’t know anything.  
  
\--  
  
In the spring, someone brought Suu flowers and put them by our bed. On the note was signed my name, forging my signature perfectly. Rex told me to watch Wolffe about that. He seemed to think that Wolffe was some kind of criminal mastermind.  
  
Wolffe was actually productive on the farm in ways I didn’t expect. Suu and I would hear him out in the loft with Rex, the two of them talking animatedly about the people and places they knew. They were always making each other laugh. Sometimes at night, we’d still hear the screaming. But it never went on for long. Any time Rex had a nightmare, Wolffe would wake him up. We’d hear him talking gently, but more loudly than he knew, “Shhh, brother, it’s okay. I got you.”  
  
He proceeded to cover the ceiling in the loft with a large painting of a shapely green Twi’lek wearing almost nothing. Rex didn’t say a thing about it.  
  
Wolffe had a lot of thoughts on our primitive plumbing situation. He helped Rex design a solar hot water tank and we rigged up pipes directly from the well to the house. Three clones doing plumbing together went about as well as you would imagine.  
  
One day at the depot, Wolffe used my signature to make purchases and had a package delivered to Suu with bubble bath and sparkling wine. He encouraged me to serve Suu and wash her feet. while she took a bath. I asked why, he said just to trust him. I thought I had seen that on one of those music disk covers. He wasn’t wrong, though. I got to join her in the tub and the water got a little out of control. We opened the door of the flooded bathroom wrapped in towels, since our clothes were soaking wet on the floor. The first thing we saw was Wolffe in the hallway applauding. He laughed maniacally all the way to the shed, loudly making double entendres about getting the ‘sump pump’.  
  
A few weeks after the unveiling ceremony, we had an area social gathering for the beginning of planting season. Wolffe heard that some important guy from the Coruscant headquarters of the missionaries’ religion was coming to accept our grateful thanks and to bring the new lesson plans and Imperial teaching materials that they would be using from then on.  
  
When we got there, Wolffe said he was going to take a piss in some bushes. Instead, he broke into the closet where they were storing the textbook files and he hacked the templates. He proceeded to spend a few hours making modifications to the history files in particular. Then he still found the time to have sex with the school director’s wife in an empty classroom on a tiny desk. A fact he immediately told me about.  
  
“Now, missionary? I don’t know about all that. I can tell you about the reverse mynock. And shaak style. Oh, and the water lily.” He vaguely mimed things.  
  
Rex seemed to think that this was a tame evening for him and congratulated him on his restraint.  
  
“What was he like on drugs?” Suu whispered to me on the ride home.  
  
\--  
  
Once the Civil War started, the missionaries were evacuated from the planet, so the school building went a little derelict. We taught our kids what we could at home like we had before.  
  
When Jek was seventeen, he left home and explained in a note. He got a prestigious art school scholarship from the charitable foundation of the royal family of Alderaan. We didn’t know he’d applied for school, but he’d submitted the paperwork and his portfolio in secret. I believe his coronation painting was the first piece he included.  
  
He ran off to Coruscant and he took the guitar girl with him. They wrote us when they got there to tell us they had eloped. They sent us a holo-still of their wedding photo with the matching eyebrow rings. Our neighbors tried to talk their daughter into coming home, but she said she just couldn’t do that. She said that although they loved their families, they’d rather live off of canned food rations in the big city together. The scene for noisy guitar music was amazing, or so Jek said. Our neighbors were sure they were making a big mistake, but I always taught my son that he should live the life he wanted. I knew he wouldn’t have listened to me anyway.


End file.
